This is a new collection of 23 short stories and poems that will delight Gaiman’s army of fans. But what about new readers? Almost alone in the universe, I found his last novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, unconvincing. So here was another chance – many chances – to discover where the reputation comes from.

Let me say this. It’s not from his poetry. The book opens with Making a Chair – and at the start of stanza five we get: “Making a book is a little like making a chair / Perhaps it ought to come with warnings / Like the chair instructions.” How could any writer with even a passing acquaintance with the glorious canon of English-language poetry kick off a collection with a poem this mundane unless writing for children? Meanwhile, “the retired dentist from Edgbaston” in My Last Landlady reads like a jejune parody of Eliot’s “small house-agent’s clerk” from The Wasteland; in fact, it is supposed to be a “scary” poem but the only thing scary about the poetry in this collection is its inclusion.

I’m afraid I didn’t much enjoy the 20-odd page introduction either: “I wrote this story on the Isle of Skye, while my then girlfriend Amanda had flu and tried to sleep it off. When she awoke I would bring her soup and honeyed drinks and read her what I had written of the story…” I’m just not sure how Gaiman wants us to take passages like this. Indeed, the introductory tone seemed generally designed to address some kind of perpetually wilting teenage goth. “There are things that profoundly upset me when I encounter them … But they teach me things … and if they hurt, they hurt in ways that make me think and grow and change.”

So far, so icky. But then things start to get much better. I’ve been going to Skye myself ever since I was a boy. Indeed, I often stay beneath the Cuillin mountains (“the bones of the Earth” as Gaiman calls them) and was walking the ridge only a few months ago. So the story set there – The Truth is a Cave in The Black Mountains – was the first I read. And it is superb. Well constructed, exquisitely voiced, the spell cast in the first paragraph and sustained with invisible skill until the last. Gone the oafish carpentry of the poetry. Instead, a sure-footed prose style (and rhythm) told the tale of two deeply unsettling characters on their journey until … “out of the shadows it came, and it stared down at me with empty sockets, smiled at me with wind-weathered ivory teeth”. Close to perfect.

And there are more treats in store. The Sleeper and the Spindle is another masterclass: warm, richly imagined, technically subtle, wry and funny and startlingly original. One line will have to do: “‘Wake her now?’ asked the middle-sized dwarf, hand still clutching his rock, for he thought only in essentials.” (That last – a phrase indicative of the depth of Gaiman’s gift when he’s immersed and the self-consciousness drops away.) The Sherlock Holmes story is very well done and never goes offkey. Not quite brilliant but gripping is Black Dog, which reaches for something ancient and interesting.

Indeed, there is so much that is clever and skilful in among the embarrassments that by the end I was reminded of Paul McCartney, another copiously talented artist, who seems to have no sense of which of his works are breathtakingly good and which breathtakingly bad.